Back In Touch: NASA Regains Contact With Long Lost STEREO-B Spacecraft After 2 Years

First Posted: Aug 23, 2016 07:46 AM EDT
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Nasa has successfully re-established contact with one of its solar observatory spaceships STEREO-B on 21st August, after nearly two years of radio silence. STEREO-B is one of two spacecraft that make up NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO). The goal of the program is to study the Sun and better understand its behavior: Specifically, to figure out the origins of coronal mass ejections.

To study these solar outbursts, NASA launched STEREO-A and STEREO-B in 2006. Both spacecraft were inserted into heliocentric orbits; STEREO-A positioned itself "ahead" of Earth, while STEREO-B fell "behind" Earth, as per report by The Verge.

How NASA lost contact

According to Nasa, the communications may have been blocked due to the sun's interference. "Communications with Stereo-B were lost during a test of the spacecraft's command loss timer, a hard reset that is triggered after the spacecraft goes without communications from Earth for 72 hours," said Nasa spokesperson Karen C Fox.

In 2014, just as Stereo-B was about to commence orbiting the other side of the sun NASA lost contact with it. However, according to International Business Times UK, contact was re-established on 21 August after the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories mission team used NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) to effectively end the 22-month-long radio silence with the spacecraft.

Regaining contact

"The DSN established a lock on the Stereo-B downlink carrier at 6.27 pm EDT. The downlink signal was monitored by the Mission Operations team over several hours to characterise the attitude of the spacecraft and then transmitter high voltage was powered down to save battery power.", said Fox.

The Mission Operations team is planning to perform further recovery processes to evaluate the spacecraft's health, re-establish control of attitude and assess all instruments and subsystems. Scientists are taking their time to produce a brief set of rescue instructions to save the spacecraft.

"But although the feat is a cause for celebration, every scientist involved in the STEREO mission is on the edge of their seats", says STEREO Project Scientist Joe Gurman."The very hard and scary work is just beginning." The STEREO-A spacecraft continues to function normally.

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